Tag Archives: Observable Universe

Ever wished the day was a bit longer? If so, you could move to Venus. The second planet from the sun takes 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis—making a day there a whopping 5,832 hours.

Even more interestingly, because it’s closer to the sun than Earth, it has to travel faster than Earth to remain in orbit and not crash into the sun.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – JUNE 8: (ISRAEL OUT) The planet Venus is visible as a black dot as it transits across the face of the sun as seen from the Tel-Aviv university June 8, 2004 in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The rare astronomical event last occurred in 1882, while the next transit is due in 2012. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

So because of this increased speed, and its shorter path around the sun, a Venusian year is only 225 Earth days long. So quite unique to Venus, a Venusian day lasts longer than a Venusian year.

If you’ve ever seen someone speed-walking and seen a different person running quite slowly, you should instinctively understand that the difference between a walk and a run cannot accurately be described as a matter of speed. So what’s the difference then?

When an animal is running, at some point during its stride, all of its feet will be off the ground at the same time. A run is basically a series of jumps in succession.

Cheetah Running — all four feet are off the ground

When walking, there is always at least one foot in contact with the ground, and the motion is a series of falling forward and catching yourself actions.

One of the most common metrics to measure a country’s worth is Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. If countries were a company, this would ultimately be their gross revenue.

During the era of the black plague, many thought the contaminants in the air were the cause. As a result, they came up with the bright idea that they’d be best served to cover their drinks to prevent contamination.

Ever notice that removable sewer lids are always a circle? Others that are attached via a hinge may not be, but all the removable ones are.

This is because a circular lid is the only shape that cannot fall inside itself. A square lid could be turned sideways and diagonally for instance and fall right in. So to keep the lid from accidentally falling down into its hole, it’s almost always a circle.

We should all know about the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), it’s the cause for the disease we all know as AIDS (Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome.)

So how do you tell the difference between apes and monkeys? One difference is that monkeys usually have tails, where apes usually do not.

Most people know that the word phallic means something that looks like a penis. Well, there’s a female equivalent—yonic. I’m not adding a picture of that. We here at Logical Libertarian are not that kind of website.

The federal register was enacted in 1935—a list of all federal laws. It was 11 pages. As of 2015—an astounding 81,611.

Pic of a Federal Register from senator Mike Lee’s (R) office.

If you ever wonder why Libertarians complain about an ever-oppressive government, one of the concerns is that no single person could be reasonably expected to know what’s in the register, and therefore be comfortable they are not engaged in, nor committed a criminal act, and are therefore safe from prosecution.

Think Americans don’t have balls?

Americans Pulling Down Statue of King George During the American Revolution

Ever hear the term “Be back in a jiffy”? A jiffy may sound like just a made up word, but it’s actually considered a real unit of time—specifically 1/100 of a second in most circles.

If you go to Google, and type in convert seconds to jiffies, it will basically multiple the seconds by 100. The term seems a bit fungible, as is written here, other circles use it for other periods of time. So when someone says they’ll be back in a jiffy, unless they’re superhuman, it’s a bit of hyperbole.

But nothing changed about its chemical makeup in that equation. So since we know that kinetic energy is 1/2(mass) x velocity2, think of it this way. If you were to get hit with that object while it’s moving at 10 mph for instance, it will hurt the same (impart the same energy on you), regardless of whether you’re standing on Earth or Mars when you get hit.

Now that you understand that, then remember that the force of gravity is based on the mass of something, and that an object in orbit is in orbit based on two equal forces; the speed it’s moving laterally passed an object, and the speed gravity is pulling it towards that object.

So once we put something in orbit around an object like the moon, since we know how gravity works, from there, we just have to do the math.

There are two forces that determine your weight on Earth. Gravity, which is bringing you and Earth together, and for the most part, is constant around the Earth, (Technically, more dense areas of Earth will yield a higher gravitational pull).

The other is momentum, in this case often referred to as centrifugal force, (which isn’t a real force, but that’s another story) which is trying to throw you away from Earth because as Earth spins, your body wants to carry on in a straight line.

Earthrtrise image from our moon.

While gravity won’t really change much dependent on where you are on Earth, the centrifugal force on you around the equator is at its maximum, where Earth is moving at about 600 mph, and at its minimum at the poles where it’s just spinning in place.

We often think of the term “The Observable Universe” as a very large bubble type structure, while that’s largely what the observable universe is considered to be, it’s not quite accurate by the etymology of the words.

Observable Universe Map

The term observable universe is about the speed of light. For instance, if an item is one year old but more than one light year away, its light hasn’t had time to get here yet for us to observe it.

So while there’s a virtual “bubble” emanating away from Earth at the speed of light which is the observable universe’s border, for lack of a better word, there are also things inside that bubble, that are still not observable as well.

Ever hear the term, “The observable universe?” The “observable” part has to do with the speed of light. If you look up in the sky, you are seeing light that has had time to reach you. So if something were 1 light year away, and it were a year old, it’s in the “observable” universe. If it is 1.1 light years away, and only one year old, it would NOT be in the observable universe. How could you observe it when its light hasn’t gotten here yet?

How Orbits Work

Many people believe that astronauts on the space station, the moon, the planets, etc., are floating in space with no real understanding of why they’re in orbit. Orbit just means that they are actually falling towards other objects they’re orbiting.

Imagine Earth as a big ball, which it is, and you’re standing on top of it. You hold a gun horizontally and fire it. The bullet, like the ball’s shape, will have an arc to its trajectory. Gravity will pull the bullet to fall towards the ball. If the bullet goes too slow (Figure A), the bullet’s trajectory arc will be shorter than the shape of the ball’s arc, and the bullet will fall onto the ball.

But if the bullet is too fast, the bullet’s trajectory arc will be larger than the ball’s arc (Figure B) and it will go away from the ball as the ball falls away from it.

Get it just right however, and the bullet will circle around the ball, falling forever. This is what constitutes orbit.

So when astronauts in orbit are ready to return to Earth, all they do is decrease their speed (They are doing about 18,000 mph while in orbit), and gravity does the rest.

He devised an experiment with “teachers” and “learners.” The teachers were the experiments, the learners were just actors playing a part.

Stanley Milgram

The teachers were to ask the learner a question via intercom in a separate room (the teachers could not see the learners, only hear them). If the learner got the answer wrong, the teacher was to administer a shock. The shock wasn’t real, but the teacher’s didn’t know that, since they were part of the experiment. The learners got the questions wrong of course, and the teachers started shocking them, upping the voltage with each successive wrong answer as instructed by the person running the experiment.

As the learners cried out in pain, some learners even indicating they had a heart condition (remember, this was all a rouse, there were no actual shocks), the teachers kept shocking them. Some teachers expressed concern, and a few did stop, but most indeed did as they were told.

Unlike Nazi soldiers, the experiment directors were neither armed, nor threatening the teachers in any way, thus demonstrating that many Nazi soldiers indeed may have not been doing anything more than doing as they were told.

Sonic Booms

So why the boom? This has to do with the speed of sound, obviously. Imagine a plane were stationary, and sound was emanating from it. That sound is actually waves of energy hitting you at very fast intervals. We’ll say a thousand times a second for convenience’s sake, but that interval changes with frequency.

That sound takes time to get to you, and in that moment between the sound being created and you hearing it, you’ll hear nothing, even though the plane is making a sound, because the sound hasn’t gotten to your ears yet.

Now imagine the plane is coming to you at the speed of that sound (the speed at which a sonic boom is created). So its sound waves are traveling at you at a thousand times a second again, but each successive wave of that one thousand waves per second is 1/1000th of a second closer to you than the last one. Therefore, the plane, and all of those one thousand waves in that second are going to hit your ears at exactly the same time, instead of 1000 times over the course of one second, and BOOM!

Gravity

Imagine you were to drop a bowling ball and a feather, which will hit the ground first? Everyone knows that the bowling ball, and the belief is because it’s heavier. But this isn’t really true, instead it’s about wind resistance. Gravity pulls on all items equally, and if there were no air to slow the feather down, which the bowling ball bores through much easier, the two would strike the ground at exactly the same time. Don’t believe me? See below.

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log·i·cal: capable of reasoning or of using reason in an orderly cogent fashion lib·er·tar·i·an: an advocate of the doctrine of free will; a person who upholds the principles of individual liberty especially of thought and action